The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Christopher Hitchens Read Free Book Online

error drest—
Believe me, I can quote the Koran too,
    The unbeliever knows his Koran best.
And do you think that unto such as you,
    A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew,
God gave the Secret, and denied it me?—
    Well, well, what matters it! believe that too.
Old Khayyám, say you, is a debauchee;
    If only you were half so good as he!
He sins no sins but gentle drunkenness,
    Great-hearted mirth, and kind adultery.
But yours the cold heart, and the murderous tongue,
    The wintry soul that hates to hear a song,
The close-shut fist, the mean and measuring eye,
    And all the little poisoned ways of wrong.
So I be written in the Book of Love,
    I have no care about that book above;
Erase my name, or write it, as you please—
    So I be written in the Book of Love.
What care I, love, for what the Sufis say?
    The Sufis are but drunk another way;
So you be drunk, it matters not the means,
    So you be drunk—and glorify your clay.
Drunken myself, and with a merry mind,
    An old man passed me, all in vine-leaves twined;
I said, “Old man, hast thou forgotten God?”
    “Go, drink yourself,” he said, “for God is kind.”
“Did God set grapes a-growing, do you think,
    And at the same time make it sin to drink?
Give thanks to H IM who foreordained it thus—
    Surely H E loves to hear the glasses clink!”
From God’s own hand this earthly vessel came,
    He shaped it thus, be it for fame or shame;
If it be fair—to God be all the praise,
    If it be foul—to God alone the blame.
To me there is much comfort in the thought
    That all our agonies can alter nought,
Our lives are written to their latest word,
    We but repeat a lesson H E hath taught.
Our wildest wrong is part of His great Right,
    Our weakness is the shadow of His might,
Our sins are His, forgiven long ago,
    To make His mercy more exceeding bright.
When first the stars were made and planets seven,
    Already was it told of me in Heaven
That God had chosen me to sing His Vine,
    And in my dust had thrown the vinous leaven.

Of Religion

    From Leviathan

T HOMAS H OBBES

    Atomist ideas began to revive in the seventeenth century. Sir Isaac Newton included ninety lines of De Rerum Natura in the early drafts of his Principia . Galileo’s 1623 work, Saggiatore , was so infused with the atomic theory that its friends and critics both referred to it as an Epicurean book.
    However, at no time was it other than extremely dangerous to profess any public doubt about religious orthodoxy. Galileo was to discover this to his cost. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who had to live in exile and who was suspected of unsoundness by both sides in the English Civil War, took great care to make formal professions of loyalty to the established Church but found ways in his writing to throw doubt on faith. The heresy-hunters were probably shrewd, if literal-minded, to threaten him with a trial by Parliament on charges of atheism in 1666.
    In Chapter XII of Leviathan , his massive essay on statecraft, Hobbes ridicules religion by supposedly defending true faith against paganism.
    Seeing there are no signs, nor fruit of religion, but in man only; there is no cause to doubt, but that the seed of religion, is also only in man; and consisteth in some peculiar quality, or at least in some eminent degree thereof, not to be found in any other living creatures.
    And first, it is peculiar to the nature of man, to be inquisitive into the causes of the events they see, some more, some less; but all men so much, as to be curious in the search of the causes of their own good and evil fortune.
    Secondly, upon the sight of any thing that hath a beginning to think also it had a cause, which determined the same to begin, then when it did, rather than sooner or later.
    Thirdly, whereas there is no other felicity of beasts, but the enjoying of their quotidian food, ease, and lusts; as having little or no foresight of the time to come, for want of observation, and memory of the order, consequence, and dependence of the things